The image is made of 3 components:

1. more or less correct background cg image
2. a 3D model of the BMW 1er series
3. geometry with a camera projected texture of the cg image mentioned above

and of course a stereo camera rig. The image was rendered with v-ray using its great render buffers and composed in fusion.

This project is definitely one of the milestones of my career. I guess, the title says it all... In fact, this image is a little controversial, but the proces was worth every vertex touched. Despite of the tightest schedule ever and a pretty complex postproduction I've learned a lesson: "A renderer (architectural category for 3D arch-viz artists) isn't ment for co-developing the building design".

Word.

You can see this image larger and some interiors in my portfolios arch viz section.

Since v-ray 2.0 has a simple checkbox making the dispersion effect a piece of a cake, doing this in mental ray and maya seems to be still a challenge. It's not, that mental ray would not support dispersion, of course it does! One of the wizards just needs to make his shader public... For 3DS Max Hakan "Zap" Anderson wrote a script, which does the trick - but in fact its a fake, a good one though! The l-glas shader supported this feature too, but that's "ages ago" and it was a quite "rudimentary" approach missing a few features of refractive materials... Anyway - I rendered in mental ray for maya using the mia_material, than took the trick from Zap and reproduced it in the postpro using photoshop and/or fusion. The picture above is composed in fusion, but you can find a photoshop composit in my portfolio too... The workflow? Check out my tutorial page (menu -> left upper corner).

This is a project from 2008 - just for fun and some workflow experiments. Its all modeled and shaded in maya 8.5 and maya 2008, rendered with mental ray. There were 3 main aspects to point out:

1. checking an efficient polygonal modeling approach aiming to a level of mesh resolution, which could be used by any other person for further modifications without subdividing (or reversible subdivisions) at modeling stage.
2. to build a fast carpaint shader and work out a decent studio render setup.
3. having a hell of a lot of fun.

Check out my portfolio for more images.